Our Team Leader, Tibor Pacher, visited the GLXP Team Summit. Here's his short report.

---

My journey to the 2011 Team Summit started with a two and a half hour delay of the Budapest-New York flight on 9th July, with the suggestion to take a hotel in NYC on Saturday night before heading to San Francisco. This seemed not to be a good start, but things turned soon to better.

Fortunately, after our arrival at the JFK Airport it became clear soon that there is still a place for me on the late flight to San Francisco; moreover, I could get on board timely as well. So I reached California more or less on time Saturday night, where the Team Summit was then immediately present; at the Rental Car Desk I met the delegates of Part-Time-Scientists, and it was good to have a first chat with Robert.

After a little Sunday-sight-seeing tour in San Francisco (where I have visited some places I knew from my earlier visits, Golden Gate from a not-so-usual perspective inclusive), I fully arrived at the Team Summit already in my hotel, where I met Andrew from White Label Space as well as two founders of Space IL, Yonatan and Kfir.

Monday morning then – the official start of the Summit, with greetings from Peter Diamandis, the GLXP Team – Cristin, Nicky, Amanda, Chanda and Alex Hall, new on board - , and Seth Shostak from our host, the SETI Institute. And the first working session, with a lot of informations from the Preferred Partners SpaceX, AGI Software and The SETI Institue itself. We learned e.g. that Falcon 1e might not be the ideal launch vehicle candidate, just because SpaceX is putting most of its resources into the development of Falcon Heavy – which will be able to carry 53.000 kg payload to LEO, more than the double of the now retired Shuttle's capacity! So several Teams changed their mind and take a close look at a possible Dnepr launch vehicle - including us!

The Moon over the SETI Institute.

The evergreen MTA theme came back to a short discussion, which will be continued off-line, before another telco conference will be held on remaining issues, preliminary scheduled sometime in late August.

After a short visit to the NASA Ames Center we went on to a very interesting panel discussion chaired by Peter Diamandis. It circled around the big question “How to get Your GLXP Mission paid”. The most difficult task for the Contestants, I believe. It was quite an appeasing feeling to hear that most of the Teams share with us the same concerns and problems with fundraising!

Then a brief review of and guidance to practical PR activities was given by XPF Vice President Cristin, before we headed to the GLXP Team Dinner.

Enjoy the GLXP Team Dinner!

The second day was also very dense, but also rewarding - first, the very interesting block of Team Presentations, then a good working lunch with Google's Tiffany Montague, where she underlined Google's interest in and active support of our Competition, which, amongst other goals, intends to pave the way to a real Space Economy.

 

Puli on Stage

We've got a Sneak Preview of the new GLXP website, which will look much more exciting than the current one and a very eloquent Robert Kelso of NASA described the science and rationale of NASA's recommendations for visiting the Lunar Historic Sites, before we went to Google's Headquarters for a short visit and casual dinner to close the very intensive and useful two-days summit.

With Synergy Moon's Kevin Myrick at Google

Let me finish with Robert Kelso's words this short summary, who said: "You are doing something that NASA does not!" - and I can just confirm:

Yes, we will go back to the Moon!